


Silent Observation

by UnfoldedUrbana



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Apocalyptic Tropes, Deaf Character, Death, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Mid-Canon, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Rating May Change, The Void, Witchcraft, mute character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-18 08:46:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18117362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UnfoldedUrbana/pseuds/UnfoldedUrbana
Summary: As Dunwall is dragged through the tortures of the Rat Plague, a lonely young man who has lost everything is touched by the powers of the Void. He is told that he will watch many things fall.





	Silent Observation

Nil made his bed in the rafters of a squat tenement near the edge of the Old Waterfront. His bed was made of the rags and clothes and body bags that he’d found drifting in the Wrenhaven, having dried them by the side of a stove three floors down and folded them into a neat layer of padding. Atop this, he placed a single wooly blanket, spotted with whale oil in a corner but otherwise miraculously untouched. It was his last memory of the Flooded District home that had begun to crumble before his eyes. When each room had crumbled too much, he had taken only what he could carry; piece by piece, even these precious things had been eaten or stolen or given away. Only the blanket had remained on his shoulders. He curled beneath it on his first night in the lonely rafters, and dreamed of a place of blue and gray, of stone islands and flying whales. A black eyed man floated over him and said things as dark marks appeared on his hand. Nil couldn’t hear what he said.  
He had always been deaf. And mute. Nil’s ears were perfect, the doctor had once written, as were the workings of his throat, which suggested an inborn sickness of the brain. Even in this beautiful dream, Nil had existed in silence. The only message conveyed to him came through a note, strewn on the decayed edge of his old, flooded home:  
“You have watched it fall. You will watch many things fall.”  
Nil scratched his name on the wall that morning, and sat back rubbing the fresh marks on his hand when finished. He considered adding an “E” on the end. This was not the first time considering; only now he was nineteen years old, and there were no schoolteachers or caretakers to switch his wrists and make faces at him as they spoke silent, angry things.  
But as he took up the pebble to add one more scratch to the wall, his hand glowed and a vision poured over the room. He saw another person – no, a pale figure of himself – crouched on the bedding before the name, carving each letter with careful strokes. Grinning openly, he drank in the events of only a moment past, and even as it faded, the attic was less lonely than before.  
So began Nil’s life by the Old Waterfront. He would scavenge for food in the silent alleyways, and sometimes he found whale bones, which satisfied an entirely different hunger. Quiet alleys and picked-over tenements would grow alight with highways of rats and humans past. Nil learned to tease out the individual movements, and with extra force of concentration, he could force a rat back from the sewer which it had scampered to and directly to his hand, laid neatly on the ground where it had been. Roof tiles and stray books could be slotted back in place at will, or pulled into further disarray with jarring force. He could skip stones on the congealed edges of the Wrenhaven and return them to his fingers, drop fearlessly from the rooftops and appear unharmed where he began. Once, when a weeper had stumbled up to his bed in the night, Nil had held out a single glowing hand and pushed her back out to the streets she had come from. Then he had crumbled the doorway in on itself as protection. In the morning he would fix it up again.  
As rats descended on a young man of the city watch, Nil pulled them until they were skittering backwards in a flurry of rewound motion. As his fist closed, they shrank and curled into blind juveniles, then soft, pink embryos. The watch man stared hang-jawed, and then he drew a gun. Afraid, Nil held up both hands. As the pistol fired, time shuddered, a dull bullet crawled back into its chamber, and then the chamber itself began to break apart. Disassembled, the pistol’s remains grew soft, then molten, crawling down the watchman’s arm. The smell of cooked flesh drew new hordes of rats back from the sewers, and they sprang upon the watch man with sudden fury. His partner, older, and wiser to avoid the lower alleys, had watched the scene, but Nil had already left for the deeper alleys by the Waterfront, collapsing brick and beam behind him.  
Alone that night, Nil dreamed again of floating islands. The black-eyed man was smiling at him, and Nil thought that if his eyes were not so black they might look like brothers. Nil passed through scenes of his ruined home, the hearth that had once warmed a whole family now frigid and infected with mold. He walked onto a patch of stark marble lined with golden-masked men, and then to a covered grave plot – his own. Beside the plot laid a poster bearing Nil’s face, sharp-nosed and gaunt. “WANTED,” it read, “The WITCH of the Old Waterfront. For the remorseless assault of a City Watch officer resulting in death.”  
The masked men would find Nil in the waking world, all too soon.


End file.
